Google is building its second private subsea cable

Named Dunant (after Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross), the cable will go overland to follow a terrestrial link to the Chocolate Factory's cloud region in Belgium.

Indeed, Dunant will be the first trans-Atlantic cable exclusively owned by a non-telecom company.

Despite its Curie cable, the company's first privately-owned intercontinental cable project which stretches from Los Angeles to Valparaiso in Chile, being a year away from its planned go-live date, Google's growing need for high-bandwidth and low-latency infrastructure has given it the need to launch a second and even larger cable project: Dunant, named for Nobel Peace Prize victor and Red Cross founder Henri Dunant, which will run from North Virginia to Belgium via the west coast of France.

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The cable will be constructed by TE SubCom, and is expected to enter service in 2020. "It adds network capacity across the Atlantic, supplementing one of the busiest routes on the internet, and supporting the growth of Google Cloud".

This marks Google's twelfth subsea cable investment but just its second private one. Once complete, the cable will offer "well-provisioned, high-bandwidth, low-latency, highly secure cloud connections between the USA and Europe", Stowell rites. The cables are generally meant to improve the performance of the company's cloud computing infrastructure, with Curie being the first subsea cable commissioned by a major non-telecommunications company, PC Mag wrote. We've worked with consortia on other new cables-including Havfrue, HK-G and JGA-S - and will continue to invest in consortium cables in the future. "Cables are often built to serve a very specific route", Stowell explains. "When we build privately, we can choose this route based on what will provide the lowest latency for the largest segment of customers", Stowell said while offering the rationale behind the decision to build Dunant privately. "In this case, we wanted connectivity across the Atlantic that was close to certain data centers".